Lesson 2	Overview of OPS enhancements
Objective	Identify Oracle Enhancements for Parallel Server

Overview of OPS enhancements

The Oracle Parallel Server has been in existence for several years. The primary reason for Oracle8i's enhancements is to ease the DBA’s set up and management of the OPS environment. Review the table below summarizing these enhancements.

Enhancement	Description
Parallel Server Manager	Supports management of OPS; this additional tool is located in the Enterprise Manager.
OPS Assistant	Assists in the creation and installation of OPS databases.
Instance affinity	Enables you to use DBMS_JOB to limit an operation to one instance. This can improve performance and makes OPS more compatible with replication.
Fast-Start Recovery	Speeds up the recovery process so that recovery and roll back can be done simultaneously.
Cache fusion	Enables direct memory transfers of data from one instance to another, reducing I/O calls to the database.
Connection load balancing	Balances the amount of activity among the parallel nodes. This is a feature of Net8.
Oracle Performance Monitor	Allows access to certain `V$` data dictionary views to monitor performance of the OPS. This is an additional enhancement toParallel Server Manager.

Many of these features are discussed in this module. However, some of these features were covered earlier in this course.
The next lesson covers using the OPS Assistant to define OPS instance.